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Why Trello Failed to Build a $1B Business

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Re: Why Trello Failed to Build a $1B Business

#51

Post by hermitcrab »

gist wrote: post #21
d--b wrote: post #4

Interesting, but I can't help thinking that this was fairly obvious, am I the only one? It already blows my mind that it is that big already. The app is a todo list with several columns. Todo lists don't make billion dollar businesses... and yeah, SMBs are fine with actual post-its!

> SMBs are fine with actual post-its! I've tried many things (including Trello) and even bought a dedicated laser printer and wrote a small shell routine so I could print 3x5 cards to keep on my physical desk. By force of habit and ease of use nothing so far has topped post it notes (other than printed 3x5s or hand written 3x5's) for keeping track of things that I need to keep on top of.

Have you tried http://www.hyperplan.com? It is a rather different take on post-it note planning and desktop-based.

Re: Why Trello Failed to Build a $1B Business

#52

Post by patrickaljord »

rco8786 wrote: post #13

What is this article, I can't. In what world do we live in where we paint a $425m exit in a bad light? > They built their servers on top of Node and used MongoDB to store data so that the web app would load really fast. I stopped reading here.

> In what world do we live in where we paint a $425m exit in a bad light?

It depends how much they invested in it before selling, my ignorant guess would way less than $425m. Also some investors may have invested in it for a valuation of 1B, in which case they did not get the return they expected. Anyway, I'm pretty sure all parties involved must be doing fine.

Re: Why Trello Failed to Build a $1B Business

#53

Post by Certhas »

jasode wrote: post #34
colinramsay wrote: post #2

This is hilarious. Only in the bizarre world we live in could a half billion sale be spun out into a failure to get a billion. Would a billion have satisfied the author or would it have then needed to be two?

>Only in the bizarre world we live in could a half billion sale be spun out into a failure to get a billion. I can't speak for the author but selling Trello "for only $425m" is a failed outcome if the growth expectations was for it to become a massive $1 billion business. How do we know that? Because Trello took $10 million in VC money in 2014.[1] So we can just work backward from the $1 billion goal using basic math…

How do you get that they need to grow to 3 billion based on raising 442 million? At an annual return of 10 percent they would need to hit 1150 over ten years.

Hitting 3 billion over ten years means getting more than 20 percent growth year on year ten years in a row...

Re: Why Trello Failed to Build a $1B Business

#54

Post by blowski »

fiatjaf wrote: post #22
rco8786 wrote: post #13

What is this article, I can't. In what world do we live in where we paint a $425m exit in a bad light? > They built their servers on top of Node and used MongoDB to store data so that the web app would load really fast. I stopped reading here.

Trello is actually slow, because of that backend stack, I imagine. I thought the author was going to point to that.

Do you have any data to back that up? I rarely hear people saying Trello slow, usually the opposite.

Re: Why Trello Failed to Build a $1B Business

#55

Post by rhizome »

hermitcrab wrote: post #51
gist wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> SMBs are fine with actual post-its! I've tried many things (including Trello) and even bought a dedicated laser printer and wrote a small shell routine so I could print 3x5 cards to keep on my physical desk. By force of habit and ease of use nothing so far has topped post it notes (other than printed 3x5s or hand written 3x5's) for keeping track of things that I need to keep on top of.

Have you tried http://www.hyperplan.com ? It is a rather different take on post-it note planning and desktop-based.

Masonry is nice and all, but like a lot of taskplan implementations it suffers from signal overload. Rows, columns, color coding, icon/sticker coding, text...

Re: Why Trello Failed to Build a $1B Business

#56

Post by obiefernandez »

I LOVE Trello and was an early adopter. At one of my companies I even hacked together some mission critical tools (KPI-related) that depended on Trello as a front-end, with the reporting generated on a custom Rails backend.

When I moved to an "enterprise" company, I wanted to bring Trello with me, but was immediately told NO because 1) we were already using JIRA and Asana, and a third option was not desired and 2) Trello is (was) not "enterprise-grade" meaning they didn't have sufficient security vetting or centralized user provisioning (and more importantly--deprovisioning.) It was demoralizing and stupid. RIP Trello.

Re: Why Trello Failed to Build a $1B Business

#57

Post by jasode »

Certhas wrote: post #53
jasode wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Only in the bizarre world we live in could a half billion sale be spun out into a failure to get a billion. I can't speak for the author but selling Trello "for only $425m" is a failed outcome if the growth expectations was for it to become a massive $1 billion business. How do we know that? Because Trello took $10 million in VC money in 2014.[1] So we can just work backward from the $1 billion goal using basic math…

How do you get that they need to grow to 3 billion based on raising 442 million? At an annual return of 10 percent they would need to hit 1150 over ten years. Hitting 3 billion over ten years means getting more than 20 percent growth year on year ten years in a row...

>Hitting 3 billion over ten years means getting more than 20 percent growth year on year ten years in a row...

Exactly! When Harvard University invests some of their endowment in a Sequoia VC fund, they are expecting returns better than 20%!

To compare, here's my previous comment about USV's 22%+ returns: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12678009

Re: Why Trello Failed to Build a $1B Business

#60

Post by officelineback »

I mean, I get what the guy is saying, but look at the text vs subtext here:

text is "here is advice to take a burgeoning company to the stratosphere" But honestly, how many people in that position are going to read this blog post? 3? 10? If this was his true intention, he would have packaged this as some kind of super premium offering that only well-connected VCs could read or something.

subtext: "I'm really smart about what takes a company from success to HUUGE SUCCESS." Is this guy trying to gain a rep in VC circles as a CEO of late stage startups or something? What's his angle?

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